Tag Archives: livestock farming

The planning application presently before Canterbury Town Council (in the UK) to set up a research business specializing in farmed animals is a reminder that modern livestock farming is continuously serviced and promoted by laboratory-style science. In fact sheep and chickens are two species whose numbers showed an increase in the most recent Home Office statistics (for 2016): 3% and 9% respectively, compared to the general decrease in numbers of 5%, though of course not all the procedures in these cases were for agricultural purposes. The Canterbury research business uses the go-ahead name ‘VetQuest’ – for yes, vets continue to play their especially treacherous part in streamlining the movement of farm animals from birth to plate.

Among the institutions playing their part is the British Society of Animal Science, with its journal Animal. That’s a very suitable title, equivocally ‘animal’ as an individual or ‘animal’ as collective matter like water or wood. Turning the individual ever more efficiently and profitably into matter is the Society’s aim, and it’s not squeamish about the process. The most recent of the BSAS conferences, ‘Bull Fertility: theory to practice’, makes that very clear, with its sessions on ‘Optimizing semen procedures’ and ‘Pathophysiology of bull sub-fertility’. After all, “the reproductive performance of cattle is critical to farm productivity.”

That very ugly word ‘performance’, astonishingly callous when applied to fertility and the mutilated sex-lives of animals on farms, is always the crucial term for the BSAS and its kindred. ‘Performance’ is their jargon word for profitability: the end-value of an animal, less all the trouble and expense involved in hustling it there. And “there” is not just the supermarket shelf, but right into the human chops. Thus a recent article in Animal, asking and answering the question ‘How does barley supplementation in lambs grazing alfalfa affect meat sensory quality and authentication?’ (note how the animals turn from life into food even in the space of the one title), studies the problem of “excessive odour/flavour in the meat” and the consequent “purchase resistance”. You’ll be interested to know that barley supplementation doesn’t solve this serious performance failure: something for VetQuest to look into, perhaps, if it gets planning permission.

The most famous example of animal science as applied to meat-producing is the work of Dr Temple Grandin (“the world knows her”, it says on her web-site). For many years she has been a professor of animal science at Colorado State University, specializing in the behaviour and management of farm animals. This is a remarkable woman, someone who evidently does have an understanding of non-human minds far beyond the strictly scientific. She attributes that to her autism, a subject on which she likewise lectures and writes with authority: as she says in her book Animals in Translation (2005) “Autistic people are closer to animals than normal people are.” [57] Specifically she believes that autistic people make much more use of the older “animal” parts of the brain, and therefore think as animals do, in pictures and details. The more lately developing neo-cortex of the brain has enabled most modern humans to think in concepts and generalisations, and indeed has strongly biased them toward doing that.

The insight which Dr Grandin claims to have gained in this way isn’t just a matter of understanding, or even of the highly-developed sympathy which she clearly does feel for animals, especially cows (“Cows are the animals I love best.” [307]). She argues, or believes she does, for animals to be more valued and more highly respected in our lives:

“I hope we’ll start to think more about what animals can do, and less about what they can’t. It’s important, because we’ve gotten too far away from the animals who should be our partners in life, not just pets or objects of study.” [303]

I say “believes she does” because although “partners in life” is a strong phrase, it’s attached here and more generally to claims about their concealed talents (concealed from us, that is). “Are animals as smart as people?” is one of the sub-headings in Animals in Translation [248]. The answer ought not simply to be “I can’t answer that question, and neither can anyone else”, which is the one she gives (and an excellent one as far as it goes), but rather ‘why should it matter?’ We need to respect animal lives as such, not just their capacities, still less the tricks we can get out of them, however intriguing these may be. This is something which Dr Grandin does not compass. In fact when she does speak deliberately about the value of “more primitive living organisms such as oysters or insects”, in her paper ‘Animals are not Things’ (2002), all her examples turn out to be value for human consumption: “bees pollinating flowers . . . a species that becomes extinct might have provided a cure for cancer . . . natural ecosystems are beautiful . . . ” and so on.

But of course a much more conspicuous instance of this compromised sympathy with animals is the use to which Temple Grandin’s knowledge of them has most profitably been put. Her fame and success in animal science arise mainly from the equipment and advice which she provides to slaughterhouses: “Half the cattle in the United States and Canada are handled in humane slaughter systems I’ve designed.” [7]

The main aim of these systems (a term which includes equipment, handling techniques, and monitoring methods) has been to reduce the fear felt by the animals. Dr Grandin writes extensively and very well about fear in animals: “The single worst thing you can do to an animal emotionally is to make it feel afraid. Fear is so bad for animals, I think it’s worse than pain.” [189] She is familiar with the research in the subject, of course. In fact she refers with surprising insouciance, even enthusiasm, to experiments which ought to arouse disgust and indignation (one “terrific study on fear and survival”, for instance, “put a bunch of guppies in with a piranha in a fish tank”, and showed how the more fearless ones got eaten first, the more nervous progressively later [196]). However, she also, again, uses personal experience to illuminate this subject: “I’m sure that’s why I relate to prey animals like cattle as strongly as I do: because my emotional make-up is similar. Fear is a horrible problem for people with autism.” [191]

For herself, the solution has been partly force of character, partly medication: “I take anti-depressants, and they’ve gotten rid of my fear.” I would guess that this success has been possible for her because her fears are mostly mind-created or at least mind-enhanced, and to that extent insubstantial. After all, Temple Grandin herself isn’t a prey animal. But cattle are, blatantly so in slaughterhouses. Their fear is wholly rational, for as she says on her web-site, “animals use their emotions . . . to predict the future” and the future in this case is quite properly terrifying. How, then, to get rid of their fear?

That Dr Grandin has indeed been able to relieve billions of animals in slaughterhouses of at least some portion of their fear is evident, and it’s surely been of real service to animal welfare. She has done nothing, of course, to relieve them of the grounds of fear. All her calming devices – the curving approach-passage which makes them feel that they’re returning “home”, the graduated lighting which makes each stage of the fatal journey turn smoothly into the next, the ‘double-rail’ conveyer giving them confidence in their uprightness – are ways of concealing the truth from the animals. In this sense they’re elaborate euphemisms, of a piece with the all-inclusive euphemism “humane slaughter” – which phrase Dr Grandin happily uses. And of course, as that phrase shows, the whole array of euphemisms works as unfounded reassurance for humans as well as for the animals. Indeed, Dr Grandin has the astonishing expression “stairway to heaven” for the ramp which cattle walk up towards the ‘slaughter hold’. It’s not a heartless joke: she means it. And the brief discussion of it on her web-site shows that even this fantastical euphemism works, for her and for others: works, that is, in reconciling otherwise decent people to their participation in the mass destruction of innocent youthful life.

Meanwhile, in making slaughter a smoother, less frenzied business, Temple Grandin has promoted its efficiency and success. For she too is in the ‘performance’ game, as her science publications clearly show. On ‘PSE’, for instance (PSE stands for “pale, soft, exudative pork”, another product which encounters “purchase resistance”), she advises slaughterhouses, “PSE increases if pigs are handled roughly at the plant, because excited pigs become over-heated . . . Rough handling, electric prods, and jamming raise lactate levels which damages meat quality.” A conference paper from 1994 advises how to prevent ‘bloodsplash’ (“a severe cosmetic defect that affects the appearance of the meat”). In fact she has produced a huge corpus of research work aimed at helping the meat industry satisfy what she calls “the needs of today’s customers”. She herself, of course, is among those customers.

Another woman who has spent long hours in slaughterhouses, the artist Sue Coe, speaks of Temple Grandin as “a sort of ‘fix-it’ person”, dealing with a fundamental wrong by putting right its symptoms. And that’s what animal science of the sort practised by the BSAS and by countless other scientists and science institutions characteristically does: for instance by devising more docile breeds of animal, finding new ways of keeping factory-farmed animals ‘healthy’ (one of VetQuest’s aims is a feed which makes antibiotics unnecessary), or demonstrating that farmers can stock pigs at higher densities with “no difference to animal welfare” and “without impacting on performance” (a recent BSAS conference highlight).

Apologists for animal research habitually argue that the animals they use are both far fewer in number and much better treated than farmed animals. But in fact modern farming methods would not exist without the constant aid and attention of laboratory-style research: the two are not separable. The campaigning organisation PETA quite rightly ran a petition against the Canterbury planning application. It’s a very small operation that’s being proposed there, but it’s one instance of a giant-scale misuse of science and of animals.

Notes and references:

Other treatments of this theme in the VERO blog can be found in the ‘category’ list under ‘Farming Connections’.

The photograph above is of a noticeboard in Witney, Oxfordshire, a mile or so from the large Muchmeats Slaughterhouse. Oxfordshire Animal Save holds vigils on the access road to this slaughterhouse from time to time, and the photo on the left is from one such occasion.

A chart showing the numbers of animals used in experiments in U.K. universities during 2014 (the most recent reportable year) puts Oxford University top, with its grand score of 226,739 – ahead of its nearest rival Edinburgh by about 25,000.

It may be that Oxford University’s scientific leadership takes quiet satisfaction in this result, if they’ve noticed it, as tending happily to confirm the University’s pre-eminence in biomedical science. After all, wasn’t this what their new building was for, to secure Oxford’s traditional place as the nation’s prime centre of animal research? However, as posted on the Oxford Students for Animals facebook page (and many others), the new information is headed ‘How many animals has your university killed?’, so it’s evidently not intended to please the contestant institutions, or the students whom they train in the practice. Accordingly there’s a defensive (but temperate) comment underneath it, from a medical scientist at Nottingham. He compares the lives of the U.K.’s laboratory animals favourably with those of animals on factory farms, and ends with this advice: “shut the meat industry down FIRST before you try and curb the use of animals for discovering the drugs that cure our diseases.”

In one form or another, it’s a very familiar defence or put-off – as old, perhaps, as the vivisection debate itself (though not for that reason either right or wrong). It was certainly in use when the question first came before the British Parliament by means of a Royal Commission in 1875-6. Among those who tried it was the man who later became Oxford University’s first professor of Physiology, John Scott Burdon Sanderson. Part of his evidence tending to show that laboratory animals didn’t need legal protection was that ‘game’ animals were much worse off: the man had been a keen hare-courser, so of course he would have known what he was talking about. In 1927 the same argument was used by H. G. Wells in an article for the Sunday Express, in whose pages George Bernard Shaw soon afterwards demolished its moral logic thus: “This defence fits every possible crime from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter. Its disadvantage is that it is not plausible enough to impose on the simplest village constable.” Pitch-and-toss, incidentally, was a game of mixed skill and chance, played with coins, and was at one time illegal as a form of gambling, if played in the street: not as bad as picking pockets, no doubt, which in turn was not as bad as … etc., etc., until the argument comes to rest just short of mass murder.

Still, the defence is being made in this present instance by a researcher at Nottingham University, an institution which, though itself a user of animals in research (scoring a modest 17,924), does also accommodate the laboratories of the excellent Fund for the Replacement of Animals in Medical Experiments (FRAME). It therefore surely deserves a more considered reply than the Shaw quotation, and I shall try to give at least part of one.

Why, then, don’t anti-vivisectionists turn their attentions to the far greater suffering (numerically, certainly, and perhaps also in most other respects) endured by factory-farmed animals?

The first thing to say is that of course they do. I’ve used the word ‘turn’ to highlight the sleight of hand in the argument; most, if not all, anti-vivisectionists can and do have both wrongs clearly in view concurrently, as well as a whole range of others. It’s all one subject, though individuals and organisations may specialize within it: hence the one collective term by which Peter Singer identified it in the first sentence of Animal Liberation in 1975, “the tyranny of human over non-human animals”.

But vivisection is, besides, bound in with factory farming in a more particular and unpleasant way. The move from husbandry to mass-processing of farm-animals has been made possible at every stage by scientific research, including biomedical research. (Burdon Sanderson himself devoted his early vivisectional research to disease in cattle.) When Ruth Harrison first showed the public what was happening on Britain’s farms, in her book Animal Machines (1964), she made this fact very clear: “every batch of animals reaching market is a sequel to another experiment or part of an experiment.” The livestock farm and its farmer were being made dependants of the laboratory and the scientist. How far this has gone since then can be read in any issue of Farmers Weekly.

For even while Ruth Harrison was publicizing the wretched effects of this development, other voices were busily promoting it. One such was a 1965 volume in the ‘Teach Yourself’ series (of all innocent publishing brands), entitled Modern Poultry Keeping. The word ‘keeping’ has an old-fashioned suggestion of husbandry about it, but any readers of this book foolish enough to be expecting to teach themselves a job in agreeably rural surroundings, perhaps amateurishly collecting eggs in a basket, like the wholesome woman on the old Ovaltine tins, were indignantly corrected. It was now a “highly specialized business calling for men [N.B.] with a wide technical knowledge”. Raising table-poultry, for instance, “consists wholly in rearing birds that will carry the maximum amount of flesh in the shortest possible time, at the lowest cost.” You need maths, biology, and a good grounding in what the book calls “light engineering” to get that right – or someone else does, to get it right for you. And of course that “technical knowledge” also includes knowledge of the pharmacopoeia: oestrogen pellets to ‘caponize’ the would-be cockerels, antibiotics against disease, and so on.

Then there’s animal behaviour. The Nottingham scientist specifies this in his comment, reasonably enough, as one of the things that cannot be studied without the use of real animals, and indeed it’s been responsible for some of the most cruel and shameful scenes in laboratory history. Another book contemporary with Animal Machines, P. L. Broadhurst’s Science of Animal Behaviour (1963), reviewed some of these scenes, but not apologetically; on the contrary, the author took the view that the “exploitation in the service of man of the behavioural resources of animals has hardly begun.” In particular he looked forward to a time when the “pitifully small” role so far played by animals in food-production would be greatly expanded, using the knowledge gained in the laboratory of what they can be induced or compelled to do: not just to make food out of themselves at minimum expense, that is, but also to pick fruit or mind machinery, or more generally to be what his book, with naïve but untouching enthusiasm, calls “slave labour”.

So much for agriculture as envisioned from the laboratory. That things on the farm are only as bad as they are, and not as they might have been (and may yet be), can at least partly be attributed to the ‘curbing’ of such dreams at source. It’s very much harder to correct them once they’ve become real.

* * *

The man usually regarded as the founder of experimental physiology, the Frenchman Claude Bernard – a bust of whom stood on our own Burdon Sanderson’s mantelpiece in Oxford – proudly described and championed his science’s characterizing spirit as “éminemment conquérant et dominateur”. That spirit of tyranny was glaringly evident in Bernard’s own work, so much so that one of his assistants subsequently wrote, “I cry off, and am prepared to see not only science, but even mankind, perish rather than have recourse to such means of saving it.” Unfortunately Bernard’s version of the scientific spirit has survived through more than 150 years of vivisection right up to the hideous attempts of recent years at xeno-transplantation and even (not in the U.K.) the transplanting of animal heads. It’s not only farming which is pervertable by science such as this. No doubt biomedical research has produced valuable knowledge and great benefits. But some of that research, both the valuable and even more tragically the worthless, has been at a cost to animal lives, and to human decency, which no real or speculative benefit to ourselves should have been allowed to justify. So far from leaving such research to itself for a while, it’s our duty to all animals, including ourselves, to do continuously everything we can to curb it.

The new Labour leader (Jeremy Corbyn) has selected the only vegan MP in the Commons (Kerry McCarthy) as Shadow Minister for DEFRA (Dept for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs). This is brilliant news for all animal welfare and animal rights groups, and such a decision would have been unthinkable only a few weeks ago.

However, this appointment has infuriated the National Farmers Union (NFU) and every other sector of the meat and dairy industries. It has also generated a lot of negative and unpleasant comments on social media. Most of the controversy seems to revolve around the fact that she is (as described by the presenter of R4’s World at One) “a committed vegan” and this in itself makes her “unsuitable” for the job. Johann Tasker from Farmer’s Weekly (a bastion of enlightened thinking) made these comments: “This is like appointing a pacifist as Shadow Defence Secretary. This isn’t just somebody who’s vegetarian, or against the badger cull, as farmers could work with someone like that. Kerry McCarthy believes that the livestock sector is dirty and cruel, that dairy farming is about forcing cows to give more milk than is natural, and the poultry industry is about getting hens to lay more eggs than is natural.” Bizarrely, the hapless Mr Tasker has actually highlighted specific points that are all true. Livestock production is “dirty and cruel”, dairy farming is obsessed with forcing cows to produce “more milk than is natural”, and the paramount aim of the poultry industry is to maximise the output of chickens which includes laying “more eggs than is natural”.

Crucially, one of McCarthy’s most damning critiques of DEFRA ministers is that they are simply “a spokesperson for the NFU”. Obviously, the NFU isn’t going to welcome anyone who makes this sort of assessment (especially when it happens to be very accurate). Any idea that their long standing cosy relationship with every DEFRA minister for decades could be disrupted will be anathema to them. Paradoxically, instead of being “totally unsuitable”, Kerry McCarthy is the ideal choice for this role. Firstly, she is passionately concerned with the key issues of animal welfare and sustainability. Secondly, she will confront all those appalling vested interests with a detailed knowledge of what really happens within factory farming and all methods of meat and dairy production.

Unsurprisingly, the tabloids have had a field day typified by The Daily Mail which referred to her as a “Militant Vegan MP” and proclaimed: “She has been vegan for 20 years and refuses to wear wool.” In fact, she presents her so-called “militant veganism” in a very reasonable way. On R4’s World at One (16/9/15) she stated: “It’s about sustainability and good welfare standards, and I’m very happy to work with the NFU and the farming community on this. I’m opposed to the move towards ever more intensive industrialised farming and huge dairy and pig farms. Also, I’m not opposed to the badger cull because I’m vegan. I’m opposed to it because very authoritative reports by scientists and experts have said it’s ineffective, and it’s not the way to stop bovine TB.”

Finally, it’s noteworthy that the widespread objections to McCarthy’s appointment echo those made against the new Labour leader. Apparently, it’s unacceptable to employ politicians in senior positions if they have deeply held principles and genuine beliefs. These individuals want to change the world, and make it a better place for everyone (which includes all sentient species across the planet). And personally, I really like the idea of a pacifist Shadow Defence Secretary.